in case you're not reading the front page of drupal.org frequently...
http://drupal.org/node/94000
New release system for Drupal contributions now deployed!
the part all of you definitely need to read:
http://drupal.org/node/94000#developers
Along with the new release system, there have been a lot of updates
and changes to the Drupal CVS repository this year. Because of these
changes, all CVS account holders and project maintainers should
review the updated CVS and Project documentation even if they think
they are already familiar with CVS. The handbook outlines the
policies and procedures to use going forward for maintaining your
projects[1], managing your releases[2] and proper branching and
tagging[3] of your contribution on Drupal.org. More people using the
same processes means there will be more people to help others and
this will standardize our release process for the future.
Be sure to review the new version number documentation[4] so you will
know how to properly take advantage of the release system for your
modules and themes.
If you are unfamiliar with CVS branches and tags, please read the
updated CVS introduction[5] to these concepts. There is also a new
Maintainer quick-start guide[6] to help people new to CVS get up to
speed on the basics of using Drupal's contributions repository[7].
[1] http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs/projects
[2] http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs/releases
[3] http://drupal.org/node/93999
[4] http://drupal.org/handbook/version-info#contrib
[5] http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs/introduction
[6] http://drupal.org/node/94179
[7] http://drupal.org/node/321
also, for those who happened to be around for the "fun":
http://drupal.org/node/94023
"Update: Apologies for the delay in bringing drupal.org back up. In
spite of many painless conversions on scratch.drupal.org, as feared,
something went terribly wrong during the update on drupal.org. It
took us a few hours to work around the problems this caused with some
creative coding and sneaky SQL tricks. Immediately after the site was
up, it experienced about an hour of very sluggish response time. This
was due to a major SQL load put on the database server during the
conversion itself (a huge backlog of queries the mysqld was
struggling to process), the flood of traffic from bringing the site
back on-line, and some lingering PHP configuration issues that we had
setup to try to debug the faulty steps of the upgrade. The good news
is that the site is back now, it seems to be as responsive as ever,
no actual harm was done, and the new release system is working..."